August 14, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dirt Poor Islanders
by Winnie Dunn
Hachette
ISBN 978-0733649264
Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD
Intercultural struggle is the main question at hand in Winnie Dunn’s Dirt Poor Islanders: how do you define yourself between two different cultures that shape every aspect of your life? Dunn’s novel is written from the perspective of Meadow, a young, mixed-race Tongan and white girl growing up in Mt Druitt in the Western suburbs of Sydney and traces her gradual assertion of who she is as she becomes a young woman. With a liberal peppering of millennial Australian and Tongan cultural references it explores themes of girl and motherhood, sexuality and poverty. But at its crux, it provides an internal viewpoint for readers to witness Meadow’s evolution from rejection of herself and all things Tongan, to understanding where she belongs between two cultures and racial identities, and within the complex map of her family.
Built around Meadow’s gradual growth and self-acceptance, the novel adopts the arc of a bildungsroman, and is split into four sections: Soil, Bark, Salt and Blood. At the start of each section, we’re greeted by a written retelling of a traditional Tongan story, such as the story of Va’epopua at the start of Soil:
The lagoon stretched further and so too did the demi-god. From coral to seaweed to salt to wave – it became clearer to him that everything emerged in pairs. Somehow, he knew that he could not be made of woman alone. So, when the demi-god’s calves became as wide as stumps, he questioned his grounded mother yet again. ‘I am made from what?’
Slowly planting taro with her stiff knuckles and gnashing inside her cheeks, Va’epopua whispered, ‘Different.’(4)
Each of these retellings foreshadows its respective section, like the parallel in this excerpt between Meadow’s mixed racial identity and Va’epopua’s son’s parentage. By using and repeating particular Tongan phrases and motifs in these retellings, Dunn alludes to a long-lived oral history and a set of values that differ from dominant Western ideas held in Australia, and she weaves connections to these retellings throughout the story as important symbols of Tongan identity, such as childbirth, soil, and Tongan foods. In fact, the whole novel is a collection of experiences laden with meanings and lessons that help Meadow make sense of her identity, emulating the nature of oral storytelling as a means of transmitting history and values.
At first, I felt that this structure meant that the story lacked a momentum I’ve come to expect from Australian fiction, in that it was missing a central conflict or mystery to drive the plot. However, as Matthew Salesses’s explains in Craft in the real world, “causation in which the protagonist’s desires move the action forward” (27) has been dictated by dominant Western ideologies of literature as the hallmark of effective fiction, leading us to undervalue traditions that have priorities other than a story’s start or end (98). Thinking about this made me realise that it was my expectation that was lacking: Dunn’s work doesn’t offer a denouement of practical solutions to Meadow’s problems because it rejects this Western storytelling vehicle in favour of a form that resembles cyclical storytelling. It emphasises understanding and interconnectedness and, basing my knowledge in Dunn’s retellings, it engages with the essence of Tongan storytelling traditions. It’s an innovative choice, and its delicate execution marks Dunn as both an original and skilled writer in the Australian landscape.
Beyond structure, Dunn centres Tongan-Australian experiences through just about every aspect of the novel. She provides nuanced representations of Tongan-Australian people, spaces, language and kinship, suffused with so much detail and feeling that her lived experience shines through, as seen in careful details like these:
My grandmother stepped out, dressed in an entirely new outfit – a shimmery puletaha with gold embroidery. Holey ta’ovala around her waist. Ta’ovala was funny like that; the poorer it looked, the richer it was, because it meant the garment had been passed down for generations. (206)
But Dunn resists one-sided glorification to represent the complexity of Tongan-Australian culture in full. She underscores the strong bonds between Tongan people and their “togetherness,” (40) but doesn’t shy away from how those bonds can become problematic, such as how Meadow’s family expects her aunt to sacrifice her intimate relationship with a woman for the sake of their traditions (163). As a woman personally living these experiences, in a country where Tongan people are plagued by negative stereotypes, I’m certain that this is a challenging step for Dunn. But by taking it with care, she’s created an earnest picture of what it means to be Tongan in Australia: the beauty and the ‘dirt’.
By being selective and sparing in how she explains Tongan culture and language, Dunn is unapologetic about prioritising a Tongan-Australian audience and making them the cultural insiders of Dirt Poor Islanders. For those who aren’t cultural insiders, this could make the novel an occasionally alienating experience – some might even argue that the lack of explanations, or the lack of provision for cultural outsiders, prevents them from identifying with Meadow and takes them out of the flow of the story. However, Dunn has made her choice clear, and I would argue that, in a publishing industry where this is the very first novel written for a Tongan-Australian audience, it adds significant value for cultural insiders that would be diminished by catering to the white gaze. Rudine Sims Bishop explained that seeing ourselves represented is a powerful and validating experience, and it’s just as important to be exposed to the experiences of others – a statement I take to mean as that, for some readers, being made to feel like an outsider by Dunn’s work is a good thing.
As someone who isn’t Tongan nor speaks Tongan, I did occasionally get thrown by Dunn’s frequent Tongan references. Upon reflection, though, I realised that this kind of partial understanding is also a common mixed race, or ‘third culture kid’, experience that I can identify with: growing up surrounded with a mix of cultures and languages, I was often in situations where I didn’t understand the words or references around me. It’s a common, isolating experience that Dunn teaches and encourages readers to empathise with by presenting it through Meadow, who partially understands everything herself.
In a similar vein, Dunn explores racial identity for mixed race and Tongan people in Australia with sensitive accuracy. Racism is the very first thing we see Meadow experience: her white neighbour yells racist abuse at Meadow’s Tongan grandmother, causing Meadow to decide to never work with her on a ngatu again (10) and sparking her association of being Tongan with dirt and muck (112). Further on, there are frequent references to Meadow or others wanting to be pālangi (50), and accusations that Meadow is not Tongan enough: ‘Me and Nettie steered clear of proper Islander girls when we met them at Sunday school in the halls of Tokaikolo. Those mohe ‘ulis demanded we spoke Tongan too, and when we failed, they mocked us. Together, Tongans were always trying to prove how real or fake each of us were. Nettie and me, we were plastic.’ (89)
With passages like this, Dunn draws attention to the ways in which we racialize people based on their cultural or linguistic knowledge and language. She shows how external messages can influence one’s racial identity and foster internalised racism, in that Meadow initially hates being Tongan, but also defines herself ‘as half and never enough, hafekasi’ (271). But to rebut the often harmful assumption that these feelings might be intrinsic or inevitable, Dunn presents us with Meadow’s rage at the injustice of racist stereotypes during class (141) and, eventually, her realisation that she can define herself differently: ‘No one could live as half of themselves. To live, I needed to embrace Brown, pālangi, noble, peasant, Tonga, Australia – Islander.’ (275)
Dunn actively rejects the ways in which Tongan and mixed-race people are stereotyped and made to feel less than their counterparts in Australia, and it’s this aspect of her writing that I’m most grateful for. Many of Meadow’s experiences and feelings are reflected in my own life as a mixed-race Filipino-Australian woman, and it’s refreshing to not just see those experiences on the page, but to see how Dunn presents them as steps in a journey of understanding oneself.
There’s plenty more to examine in Dirt Poor Islanders, such as sexuality, motherhood, and family violence. But in the interest of writing about what I know and what I believe to be the heart of Dunn’s novel, I’ve focused on her exploration of race and culture. Despite the differences between being Tongan and Filipino, reading Dunn’s work felt like slipping on a well-worn t-shirt in how empathetically she writes growing up not-quite-white in Australia. It’s a generous, powerful debut novel, narrated with a vulnerable voice, and much like Meadow’s many mother figures, it challenges its readers while fostering love and understanding.
Citations
Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the real world. Catapult, 2021.
Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Windows and Mirrors: Children’s Books and Parallel Cultures.” 14th Annual Reading Conference 1990, California State University, 5 March 1990, pp. 3-12, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED337744.pdf#page=11.
ISABEL HOWARD(she/her) is a Filipino-Australian writer based in Lutruwita / Tasmania. Her creative work has appeared in kindling & sage, and she is currently in her Honours year studying creative writing at the University of Tasmania.
August 14, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kairos
by Jenny Erpenbeck
translated by Michael Hofmann
ISBN 9781783786121
Granta
Reviewed by GAN AINM
It’s hard to avoid the idea of allegory when approaching Jenny Erpenbeck’s International Booker Prize-winner, Kairos. Right from the cover, we are told by Neel Mukherjee that ‘Erpenbeck has written an allegory for her nation, a country that has ceased to exist— East Germany’. The Booker Prize’s own website asks us to consider the merits of reading Kairos allegorically, and most reviews will come down on one side or the other regarding the device’s efficacy.
The story of Hans and Katharina, two East German citizens in the latter years of the state, begins at a moment of, seemingly, good fortune; a chance meeting on a bus in which passions are ignited and an affair ensues. The novel itself, however, begins long after this, when Katharina hears of Hans’ death and begins to sift through boxes of letters, diaries, notes and other refuse of their relationship. Hans is a former Hitler Youth, current writer, and married with a child. Katharina, far younger, was a member of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation, a socialist youth group collective designed to uphold the values of East Germany. Hans wields a patriarchal authority over Katharina, as well as, via his several affairs, his wife and child. He is well-travelled and learned, and his experience of life before (and beyond) the wall lends him an autocratic propensity that he wields culturally, familially, and sexually. There is, then, from this initial kairos, or ‘critical moment’, of their meeting, a disparity between the two lovers, one reflective of those between East Germany and its citizens. The GDR was the socialist-controlled portion of Germany following the end of WWII. To maintain order and prevent dissent, the government placed restrictions on the freedoms and movements of its citizens to travel to the capitalist West Germany over the Berlin Wall. By the late 80s, when the pair meet, they are living in a failing state, where the tensions spawned by government overreach would soon cause its complete (and in the case of the Wall, literal) collapse.
The novel makes this allegory clear through its explicit positioning of the personal and political:
Up and down. End of season sales, says her cousin. Bargain basement prices. Words Katharina needs to learn. She tries to remember what she was taught in civics about the difference between use value and exchange value. // And not once does the phone ring. // Is Hans sleeping with his wife on their vacation? Up and down, up and down, until everything that’s for sale is practically given away.
(p. 77)
Step by step, Katharina measures herself against her state, which has been generous to her and now counts on her to be generous in return. // Did he give himself up to her, or she to him? Or, if love is serious, are they indistinguishable?
(p. 86, 98)
The same can be said of the novel’s conspicuous allusions to walls:
Before they head out again, Katharina sees a photo of Hans on the desk. Can I have that? she asks, and Hans asks back: As a wall to contain imagination? (p. 30)
The immediacy with which these comparisons and references are made (being set up and paid off within a few pages if not the same paragraph) can sometimes work against the novel and reveal the limitations of a simple A = B, B = A comparison. However, I mention the debate around the novel’s allegorical reading up front in order to posit that Kairos is in fact far more interesting than the elevator pitch version of its premise; it is evident that the majority of Erpenbeck’s actual compositional choices point towards something at once broader and deeper.
Tension and unease is baked into Erpenbeck’s writing. The lack of clear subjects and verbs throughout the novel’s persistent use of sentence fragments leaves the reader dependent on their surrounding context, perhaps reflecting not just the young Katharina’s dependence on Hans, but the dependence of both upon the state. The use of run-on sentences speaks to a similar kind of reliance, this time the need for those in power to connect dots, draw conclusions, stoke suspicions; their frenzied amalgamation and need to reach and infiltrate everything is a kind of paranoia based in the fear of the agency of others, and the possibility for freedoms to undermine the (im)balance of power. Control is the shared element of these two seemingly incongruous techniques, and it is a control wielded by Hans as well as (and because of) the GDR.
Having lived through its creation, Hans sees the socialist utopia (and, because he is the one betraying his wife, the affair) as generative. It is not a preconditioned, or in any way stable, S/state, but a system which requires maintenance, regulation, continual reassertion and the quelling of potential threats to its stability. Such betrayals take the form of infidelities (against him) which engender ever greater controls that limit the freedom of dissidents. What Katharina’s affair-within-an-affair seems to represent for Hans, then, is the fear of her freedom, of her agency in moving beyond imposed bounds and barriers, and a choice in where her loyalty, her love, her body, can lie. As with all betrayals by combatants, there are punishments, and in her reaction to these, we again see the infusion of the personal and political, with Katharina initially reluctant to cross the Berlin Wall to the (comparatively) free and capitalist West. These sharp psychological observations shine through, and indeed create a powerful parallel between the troubled lovers and the collapse of East Germany, and yet Erpenbeck pushes her writing further.
There is a conspicuous and purposeful lack of speech marks throughout the dialogue, and even occasions when dialogue is not laid out traditionally:
Well, says Hans, I can’t swim. Why’s that? The water was too cold for me. Katharina shakes her head, disbelievingly. Really? she asks. And he replies: No, not really.
(p. 57)
This technique may again point towards the idea of control and the compelled language of totalitarian states; arranging the dialogue as we would a traditional paragraph seems to take away the agency of what is being said. However, it may also represent a kind of finality, or perhaps inevitability, and this may be the book’s most devastating decision.
If speech here is not granted a special, interventionist category, via speech marks, then these are not assertions being injected into the world, but solidified, spatio-temporally fixed elements of the world. They are past, no different in kind from the scenery or sensorial recollections of a now-defunct nation, recalled in imperfect fragments by the frame narrative. This device, where we find an older Katharina reflecting back with a general lack of the dependent fragments, furthers this conclusiveness with a perspective of birds-eye omniscience:
It feels good to be walking beside him, she thinks. // It feels good to be walking beside her, he thinks.
(p. 19)
He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong. // She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means. // He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later. // And she, he’s putting himself in my hands. // All these things are thought on this evening, and all together they make up a many-faceted truth.
(p. 27)
This all-knowing perspective, like the other devices here, speaks towards a certitude, to what is doomed to happen within an imbalanced relationship from the instant of their meeting; that critical moment contains within it a ‘good fortune [which] implied always [a] misfortune that was not just equal and opposite, but in its potential for harm, perhaps even much greater’, where ‘anything seems possible, anything good, everything bad’ (p. 91, 117).
To speak briefly of Michael Hofmann’s English translation of these techniques and themes, the aforementioned devices are all preserved effectively and reverentially. Other moments, however small, seem to take more liberties; it’s difficult to see, for example, how the line “that strange word ‘believe’, with ‘lie’ in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress” could maintain its specific wordplay (and implication) in the original German (p. 46). While this might seem pedantic, I mention it only for those with the capacity to read this text in its original language.
Erpenbeck’s book is crushingly absolute. It is tinged not just with the finality with which a memory is remembered, or a fragment recollected, but the finality that reveals the inevitable, and within the inevitable lies the inherent. Power imbalances do not become manipulative and abusive, but are abusive, always and already; they require a monopoly on agency, increasing coercions and restrictions on freedom lest the authority be challenged, or abandoned.
Everything in Kairos seems to speak towards this certitude, but it is hard to see the novel as defeatist. If the book does indeed function as an allegory, then it is, like all allegories, a warning, and an act of defiance. A warning cannot be for ‘a state that has ceased to exist’. It can only be for a potential, a future, dare we say a present, one in which there opens up the chance to heed the warning; to do, to act, to be, better.
GAN AINM is a writer born, raised and living in Lutruwita/Tasmania, currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Tasmania, and whose fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Island Magazine, and received second place in the University of Essex Wild Writing Prize.
July 29, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens (2017), which was glowingly reviewed as a cover feature in The New York Review of Books, American Literature (Duke UP) and American Literary History (Oxford UP). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was one of The Australian’s Books of the Year, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award and Australian Poetry’s Anne Elder Award. Her work has been supported by numerous international grants, including the prestigious Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and a Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Lindsay was a Writer-in-Residence at Château d’Orquevaux in France and Bundanon Trust in the Shoalhaven of Australia.
Read more at http://www.lindsaytuggle.com
The Arsonists’ Hymnal
Our story starts in the field
and ends in the bath
or vice versa.
I can no longer remember when things came full circle,
when our endings and beginnings began
to eat their own tales.
In the middle, there is fire.
Summer was not yet the vast,
burning thing it has become.
Arson is a form of prophecy.
Flames have tongues, and so do we—
whether we use them or not.
The fires were warning us,
all this time.
No one believes a prophet,
until it’s too late.
That night, we lay on the grass,
watching for heat lightening.
We cannot sleep without seeing
that jagged rupture in the sky,
a tangle of stars and satellites
discernible only by blinking proximity.
After the lightening
our adolescent
poison quickens, then recedes.
After, we sleep.
But not tonight.
Tonight, we speak again in our mother tongue,
a dual fluency we alone share.
At first, we don’t hear the shift.
Slippage is like that, both sudden and gradual.
They forced it from us long ago
or so it seemed.
We remember the doctors’ creeping hands
encircling our throats,
probing the wet insides of our mouths.
A needle. A parade of arms.
Slowly, we learned to speak
the Queen’s tongue.
We forgot to remember
the poem unfurling
in the air between my sister and I,
the slow dance of our exhalations.
Then,
at thirteen,
a murmuration escaped.
Our bodies begin
to stretch and swell.
Our marrow aches.
We are always hungry.
Games over who can eat more, or less,
then dance til exhaustion.
Our limbs crave sleep,
but are too long for our narrow beds.
So we lay in the field,
waiting for the heat to break into light.
We didn’t set the fire.
Not with our hands.
We dreamed of burning for so long,
at last the lightening answered our call.
We lay still as the grass flumed ever closer,
let the dying embers kiss our skin.
In our secret tongue, we agreed
to remain, unmoving,
to let the ending write itself.
Did we wake in the bath
or the grave?
I can no longer recall
which of us resides underground.
Oracles and fire-eaters share fatal tendencies.
It is a dangerous business, prophecy.
Paralysis is innate, in the face of extinction.
Fawn response on a global scale.
When ashes fall from your mouth,
remember, you asked for this.
Swallow hard, sister.
One last time.
July 29, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anisha Bhaduri is a writer from Kolkata, who lives and works in Hong Kong. A Konrad Adenauer Fellow, her journalism has been published across Asia. She has won a British Council prize, has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for Best of the Net 2023 for her first short story published in North America and for Best of the Net 2024 for her first work published in the UK. Her literary fiction appeared in She Writes, Random House India. Her debut crime novella Murders in Kolkata 26 was published by Juggernaut Books. Bhaduri’s short stories have appeared or forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, Tampa Review, Harpur Palate, Touchstone Literary Magazine, The Hopper, Sonder Magazine, the other side of hope and Kitaab.
Tokelau
On the third day of the Lunar New Year, I noticed Mr Cheong’s eyes were blue. He was sitting with his back to the wall, on a hard chair, his elbows on a collapsible plank of laminated wood that hemmed in a little square patch of the ground floor landing. The glare from the strip of neon overhead lent a hardness to his face. Then the main door to our building opened, and closed, and the lemony light that it brought in and also expelled, cut the neon’s hardness like lightning. And, in that quiet island of colors nudging winter smells, Mr Cheong’s irises had acquired an unmistakable blue.
“Kung he fat Choy!” my son greeted him.
Ah Cheong grinned, his dentures shone. A muscle quivered on his chin as he wished my son well too.
“He speaks Chinese?”
“Reads and writes, too,” I said proudly, ruffling my son’s hair. Drawing an impossible breath that mothers do when it is suggested that their children have it in them to test limits.
“My grandchildren speak French, only French, they read everything in French. Write in French,” Ah Cheong said deliberately, taking time, as if he couldn’t believe it himself.
“Here, in Hong Kong?” my son piped up.
“Oh no, they are in Quebec. They all speak French there, nothing but French.”
“But Quebec’s in Canada, am I right, Mamma?”
Drawing another deep breath, I nodded. “Certainly.”
“Do you speak French, Mr Cheong,” I wanted to know.
“Oh no, not at all. Maybe I’ll learn when I visit them.”
The lift arrived and we said our goodbyes.
When we had moved in to this building on a Saturday in May, Mr Cheong was on duty. We had asked our landlady to make introductions.
“Are you from India?” he wanted to know in fluent English.
My husband and I exchanged a glance, a fleeting but concrete swell of relief of foreigners at a linguistic loss.
We nodded happily.
“From which part?”
“Calcutta.”
“Calcutta? You are from Calcutta? I’ve been to Calcutta so many times.”
I felt a contraction in my chest, a sudden stillness that comes when faced with the very unexpected. Only then I was properly aware of Mr Cheong. In his sky blue uniform shirt, sitting in the corner of a slight elevation from which stairs rose, an overhead fan stirring his white hair, his knuckles swollen and a smile that hid his eyes, almost.
I regarded this elderly Hongkonger and wondered what had taken him to Calcutta, again and again. What had made this man from an orderly metropolis disregard my city’s sagging heat and general filth? Did he see what I could clearly, that Hong Kong shared Calcutta’s template of conurbation – an unmistakable colonial legacy?
“I’ve been to Chennai too,” Mr Cheong declared.
“How so?” now my husband was curious too.
“I’ve worked on ships. The charters took me around the world. Calcutta, Chennai lovely cities. Great people. Liked it every time.”
There was a bland sincerity that told us Mr Cheong saw no need for curated emphasis. We became friends.
Mr Cheong was on duty only on Saturdays when he spelled our usual caretaker, also a septuagenarian. Waiting for the lift, I would chat sometimes. He would tell me about his usual place of work, closer home. How he would be rotated sometimes among the buildings that his company was contracted to manage.
“Good the government now allows more elderly people to work as janitors, security guards and caretakers.”
I would agree, remembering the piece of news clearly. How reading it had instantly brought to mind Mr Cheong.
“Hong Kong is so expensive,” he would say, bringing his hands together and rubbing the wrists. “The weather is not good for old people.”
That January, we had a cold spell. The winds brought tears and humidity hurt our bones. Rooms were fetid with colds on the mend and damp woolens bit into the body like snakes. One Saturday, he waved me over.
“I read Hong Kong had snow last Sunday. Is it true?”
“You tell me, Mr Cheong, this is your city,” I smiled, taking a while. “It was probably frost, nothing more. But it was certainly the coldest day in decades.”
“What do you think it would happen if it snowed here in Hong Kong?”
“You tell me, Mr Cheong.”
“If it snowed and there were icecaps on the sea, and if it all turned white, maybe I could take a picture and send it to my grandchildren.”
“To Quebec?”
“Yes, you remembered?” the blue in eyes glittered.
“But don’t they have enough snow there?”
“They do, they do, they have plenty. But if I had proof it snowed here in Hong Kong too, maybe they would visit.”
The lift keened in the pocket of silence.
I was suddenly seized by an image of Cindy Harlacher from years ago, in blue linen shorts and a dirty white vest, standing still in the shaded part of a terrace on the top floor of a newspaper office in Calcutta I had briefly worked in. In the newsroom, the air-conditioner was spreading a lukewarm apology and it was growing stuffier. I had to step out.
Cindy’s face was red, her alabaster arms and legs shiny with sweat and mottling slowly. Her blue eyes glittered in disbelief as heat rose from the cracked, weathered cement. It was 42ְ degrees Celsius in the sun. The slight Manitoban with a reddish mop of hair and a shy smile had told us quietly, just the day before, with the contrition of someone who was ready to be doubted in a land where the sun shone year around, that winters in her native Canada could push temperatures down to -30 degrees Celsius, even lower. We had smiled politely. In the height of an Indian summer, when an unrelenting yellow haze settled on the plains and dust spiralled like a madman’s rant, a terrain completely frozen over seemed as improbable as unseasonal rains carried over by damp winds from the Bay of Bengal.
On the terrace, as someone had called out her name, Cindy had turned around; a sweating bottle of water pressed to the side of her throat. The smile that rippled on her lips arrived moments late, and I recognized the relief of an itinerant. She pressed the cold bottle into the hands of the colleague who had turned up by her side, chatting easily, her manner animated as if she was already crossing into the realm of endless snow and silent nights, the end of her working holiday just a matter of time now.
I hadn’t thought of Cindy Harlacher since moving to Hong Kong.
Sometimes, on my way out on errands on Saturdays, I would notice Mr Cheong’s lunch sitting inside a white polythene packet – standard restaurant issue. Two flat, rectangular polystyrene boxes stacked one upon another, nudged by a lidded plastic beaker and disposable chopsticks, the shapes distinct through their polythene shroud; a disposable meal that leaves no aftertaste.
I saw men and women, even schoolchildren hurrying home at the end of the day, similar polythene bags dangling from their hands. But rarely at lunchtime. At that time of the day, fellow-feeling is greater. Co-workers tend to eat together, creating instant, ersatz families – a curious bond that is defined by the hour of the day and not the people who may have shaped it.
“Don’t you cook for Mrs Cheong?” I pointed at the takeaway, arms laden with shopping.
“When’s the time?”
“Why not? You get off at six, you can shop on your way home. Cook dinner. Don’t know how you can stand takeaway every day,” I rolled my eyes.
“Well, this is Hong Kong.”
So it is, one restaurant for every 600 people it seemed. He surprised me a few weeks later. “What happened to char siu?” I exclaimed, pointing to a bagel sitting inside a deli carton, ringed by little containers of different hue, rocket leaves peeping out like shy elves.
“That’s your lunch, Mr Cheong?”
The smile melted his eyes, and Mr Cheong nodded shyly. “Wanted to try one. The cream cheese tastes good.”
“But is it filling?” I said, moving my hands vaguely to indicate his usual fare.
“I once had cheese in Holland, brought some home too. Excellent. But it spoiled in the heat here, the children were very disappointed,” Mr Cheong said with his eyes on a paper napkin he was using to wipe off cream cheese from his chin.
“You children like cheese?”
“Oh, yes, they do. But my grandchildren love bagels with cheese. They really do.”
Between noon and one, the front door of the building would remain shut. With Mr Cheong taking a break, it was up to residents to buzz visitors in. Sometimes, a deliveryman would be at a loss, lingering apologetically. Mr Cheong would materialise, asking his business. And if satisfied, would admit him.
I asked him once, how did he know it was all right to let in a stranger. He said he didn’t, couldn’t possibly and that it was a gamble, anyway; one just hoped the bad guys would keep away. I laughed with him till nudged by an image of my little son playing on the foyer carpet, all by himself, in the shadow of our closed main door.
The fragility of it all was splinter sharp and I admonished the elderly caretaker, “You must take it seriously, Mr Cheong. You must.”
Neel had just started in a new kindergarten and wasn’t settling well. He would cling to me when I went to drop him off and I could hear him wailing long after the class nanny had collected him. There were a few, not unexpected debacles but Ms Lee, his playgroup teacher, was patient.
She told me it was remarkable that Neel insisted on starting conversations despite having little Chinese and what was even more remarkable that his little classmates seemed willing to absorb familiar words and phrases in foreign tones. Sometimes, Ms Lee said, a few words would even be exchanged. Was that progress? “Oh yes, sure la,” giggled Ms Lee.
That day, with my son’s little fingers clutching mine, as we walked back home, I asked Neel to point out in Chinese the things that he found interesting. He shook his head, lifting his arms to show he wanted to be carried.
“What? A five year old? Shame…” I intoned as I picked him up, looked into his dark eyes, smelled the fragrance that flowed only from him and breathed in deeply.
I regarded our building from the opposite pavement, waiting for the lights to change. The wind was rising and carried the smell of dried seafood along the tramlines. Chinese sausages hung from the rafters and dried fish wrapped in white paper showed their tinsel tails in the shops that lined the road. There was a stink that told you the sea was not far.
Our 14-storey building with peeling paint and protruding washing rails wouldn’t have been out of place in my native Calcutta where dilapidated block of flats stood confidently in serpentine lanes, braving open sewers and the stench of rubbish. During rains, each building was like an island with water standing irresolute around them.
There, tenants still paid pre-War rent agreed to by grandfathers long dead and landlords did little or nothing to maintain property they had inherited on paper. It was a tyranny of thrift practised generation after generation, refined, brandished – sometimes in courts – till smart developers took over, if they could. Urban renewal in that city was at the discretion of market forces and musclemen, not municipal officials. No surprise then this ungentrified strip of Hong Kong suited us.
A visitor from the fancier Mid-levels had once raised an eyebrow as a stevedore stripped down to waist had emerged from the lift pushing crates of dried sea cucumber from the warehouse a floor up.
“No cargo entrance?”
“Same lift for all.”
“Oh, I see,” she said as she lifted the pleats of her saree and wrapped the end around herself tightly.
Mr Cheong hadn’t impressed her either.
“You know, people in suits take care of our block of flats,” she said eventually, munching on onion fritters I had prepared Calcutta style, served with piping hot milk tea.
Our regular watchman, Mr Wong, was an acerbic individual with a long face who relished quarrels with elderly matrons who seemed to be in a majority in our building.
“That’s why the building is still standing,” one of them once declared angrily in lisping English. “Left to our children, the flats would have been sold off ages ago and we would be forced to live in nursing homes and shoe-box public housing units. I tell them, space matters, shininess doesn’t. But who listens? You tell me, you have a small child, isn’t it better to have more space and pay low rent?”
I couldn’t disagree but then, she was probably a rent-controlled tenant, with her spacious unit needing repairs and her kitchen and plumbing not upgraded since the 70s. Mr Cheong, who was listening, told us he lived in a public housing estate after languishing on the waitlist for five years and that he paid subsidised rent.
The graying lady with the fruit shop at the foot of our building probably paid controlled rent too. She regularly harangued buyers, had a reputation for overcharging and selling spotty fruits going soft. But a corner shop had its advantages so she seemed to get by. Sometimes, she would spare a smile which faded the instant she spotted her husband across the street smoking midmorning, without a care. He was the neighbourhood thinker.
A middle-aged man, dressed in blue jeans complemented alternately by plaid shirts and golf uppers, tails tucked neatly, the creases on his jeans faithfully meeting the laces of his pristine sports shoes; an inevitable cigarette dangling from his fingers, burning bright with every drag.
He liked to smoke in the company of Mr Cheong when the old man was on duty, both inhaling seriously, unsmiling, their eyes fixed on matters of interest they would shortly begin to comment on.
Sometimes, I was tempted to gift them packs of cigarettes for the sheer pleasure of watching the two blow perfect, leisurely rings on a Monday morning. But Mr Cheong only worked Saturdays.
When humidity climbed with the cloying heat, Mr Wong would undo all buttons of his uniform shirt and with fists bunched into pant pockets would walk up and down the lobby with his singlet showing, his sinewy arms curving out of rolled sleeves. He couldn’t stand the thinker and was rumoured to share uncharitable observations with the harmless man’s wife within his earshot.
Mr Choeng’s mariner mien was manifest in the neatness of his uniform and his blue shirt would always remain buttoned.
“How old are you Mr Cheong?”
“Guess,” he said and left it at that.
Sometimes, I thought a Chinese saint would look just like him – a head full of white hair and a face so serene it seemed the sea had sucked all tempest out of him.
One Saturday, as he handed me a letter from my parents, he wanted to know how frequently I wrote to them or called. He already knew we flew to Calcutta twice a year to visit family.
“I write to my grandparents in Bangla,” my son said as he snatched the letter from my hands and started to tear the flap open.
“It’s for him,” I told Mr Cheong.
“Stamps, stamps!” Neel screamed, jumping up and down in the lobby.
“Stickers too,” he squealed as treasures tumbled out. He held the letter close to his eyes, inhaling deeply.
“Nani, Nani,” he pointed at the handwriting of my mother.
“Dadu, Dadu,” he rubbed a finger on my father’s.
“He knows?”
“Oh yes, Mr Cheong,” I laughed, enjoying his incredulity. “He can read and write in Bangla – the language we speak.”
Mr Cheong leaned back a little and we said our goodbyes.
The Chinese New Year came and went in January and the customary red envelope we had prepared with Mr Cheong’s year-end bonus inside stayed in my handbag.
“Have you seen Mr Cheong lately?” I asked my husband on a Saturday as I was cleaning out my tote.
“Not for sometime.”
“I still have his lai see here,” I dug out the small red envelope and waved it.
“Still not back from his New Year break?”
“Let me find out,” I said, pulling on a coat.
Mr Cheong’s replacement smiled a lot. He had little English.
“Mr Cheong?” I pointed at the seat the elderly man had just vacated and moved my right hand in a gesture that splayed the fingers and brought the palm upwards.
“Is… he… still… on… leave?” I took my time with each word.
“Canada. He go Canada.”
“To visit?”
“He go, he go,” the smiling caretaker said. The aged lift screeched behind me as it winched itself up.
As I walked up the stairs, I thought of Mr Cheong. I saw him in my mind hemmed in by snow in distant Quebec, his grandchildren calling out to him in French, nothing but French; his saint’s face crumbling as the language he spoke to his children was meaningless to theirs.
And, I thought how he must be missing the sea, its saltiness.
That evening, I looked up from the newspaper I was reading and called to my son to come to me. Then, with his little hands in mine, I told him about the tiny island nation of Tokelau, a dot in the blue of the Pacific, whose population of 1,403 can only be reached by sea.
July 16, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Martyr!
by Kaveh Akbar
Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781035026074
Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY
If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among those that survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.
(250)
Dying is individual, but death punctures the social, diffusing its impacts among those that remain. Martyr! then asks: is there meaning to be found in death? What lives on with the people that remain? What makes a martyr?
Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!, sees the established Iranian-American poet turn his attention to a new form. His novel asks uncomfortable questions in the name of identity and grief, culminating in a work that attests to the singular devastations that make up collective loss. And yet, despite a fascination with the lingering potential of death, Akbar achieves a lightness that lifts his novel beyond simple pessimism.
Martyr!’s focal character, Cyrus Shams, is surrounded by death. It permeates his life: he works at a hospital, playing sick for medical students to practice counselling the terminal; he is a recovering addict, sure that every day of sobriety is a day of life he should never have seen; he is haunted by the memory of his mother’s murder in the downing of a commercial flight by a US navy cruiser. All of this death culminates in Cyrus’s fixation with, and desire to begin writing on, martyrdom.
The above extract, ruminating on the sins of suicide and the martyr, forms part of Cyrus’s work-in-progress: “BOOKOFMARTYRS.” This book helps structure Akbar’s novel, seeing the inclusion of poetry dedicated to famous martyrs, as well as passages of essayistic prose. These textual interludes feature at the turn of each chapter, alternating to also include transcripts, emails, and further details surrounding the flight on which Roya Shams lost her life. Because, ultimately, it is the ongoing impacts of Roya’s death that drive much of this novel.
Roya’s death is folded into the missile attack of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in 1988, which resulted in the murder of 290 civilians. The public memory of this attack is a site of contestation between Iran and the United States. In an interview with Nylon, Akbar explains, “When you say the Vincennes incident, people of a certain age will furrow their brows. It’ll sound vaguely familiar, but they won’t remember 290 innocent lives shot out of the sky. I’m fascinated by that. In Iran, they put it on postage stamps. They propagandize it. I’m fascinated by that, too.” The propagandization of flight 655 serves to make the civilians killed into martyrs. Their deaths assert the indiscriminate nature of the United States war machine, particularly when held against the failing memory of the United States public. In the aftermath of the downing of Iran Air flight 655, these deaths are given an ulterior meaning.
For Cyrus, this moment of tragedy is a starting point. When asked about the kind of book he conceives of “BOOKOFMARTYRS” being, Cyrus explains:
My whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was … The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after. (75).
Cyrus initially determines his mother’s death to be without meaning—simply a number among many. And although we must reconcile that Roya’s death is “not legible to empire” (75), this novel expounds a more expansive view of the potential meanings that death can carry.
Foremost, Martyr! is a novel that takes the individual loss present in mass death and inspects it. Because, on some level, Cyrus is right. How do we feel the difference between 289 and 290 deaths? Rather than succumbing to the generalised negativity of significant loss, this novel takes a step forward to invigorate the connectivity of a single life—one marred by tragedy on a mass scale.
I purposefully call Cyrus the focal character of this novel. It is a simplification to call him the protagonist—or even the main character. Martyr! uses Cyrus as a centre from which to work outwards, extending from him to offer life and voice to surrounding people and characters. Primarily, these voices belong to family and friends, but genuine martyred lives are also evoked: namely those of Bobby Sands, Bhagat Singh, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Qu Yuan. These martyrs each feature as poetic subjects of “BOOKOFMARTYRS,” their historic deaths speaking to Cyrus’s negotiations with his own time and identity. Bobby Sands, for instance, has a poem written to him that begins:
there’s a Bobby Sands Street in Tehran
one block over from Ferdowsi Avenue,
that’s true, Ireland, Iran, interchangeable mythos
(97)
This poem binds Ireland and Iran, recognising their shared suffering at the hands of colonial powers; it draws together Sands and Ferdowsi—a Persian poet whose story is later retold in Martyr!—creating a textual crossroads at which the two meet. Through Cyrus, through his human ties and writing on martyrdom, a world of active social ties is revealed.
The connectivity of Martyr! rejects the individualism that separates us from others, perpetuating apathy. In Akbar’s novel, the relationships that spring from Cyrus allow us to feel more. Throughout the novel we touch on the real lives of martyrs, but we also encounter Cyrus’s family and friends. We meet Ali, Cyrus’s father, who made ends meet throughout Cyrus’s childhood by working on a chicken farm; Arash, Cyrus’s uncle, whose time in the Iranian army was spent riding through fields of the dying dressed as an angel of death; and it is through chapters and passages such as these that we meet a clearer version of Roya, unaltered by the filter of Cyrus’s faded childhood memories—a woman who reveals, “I never really loved being alive” (145). These affecting connections extend to include others important to Cyrus: his best friend Zee, and the Iranian artist, Orkideh, whose imminent death becomes an art installation. By allowing the presence of this whole network of characters, we become more able to comprehend the dispersal of feeling that takes place when loss occurs.
Akbar does something vital in his depictions of social connectivity. He allows these characters the use of their own voices, rather than limiting them to the details known by Cyrus. Formally, as the novel shifts between characters, the point-of-view changes from its standard third-person to a more transparent first-person. While Cyrus is the centre through which we come to each of these characters, access to their experiences—their emotions—occurs through their own words. From this use of voice, these characters each come to exist as the centre of their own worlds, not exclusively the periphery of Cyrus’s, establishing the reality of their own personal connections, and a network that expands on and on.
This connectivity, this network of people who know and feel for each other to varying degrees, is how we come to parse through the distinct losses that make up mass grief. Martyr! does not deal with the problem of mass death—with the difference between 289 and 290—but it does create the space for us to feel the expansiveness of a single death, and from there we can begin to imagine the social impact of death on a large scale.
The expansive network depicted in Akbar’s debut novel alters how we come to understand the martyr, though perhaps creating more questions than answers. Finishing Martyr! I wonder if connection, if closeness, is one of the ways in which martyrs create meaning in death? Martyrdom does not exist in isolation: it holds meaning because of the life lost, and, crucially, the lives impacted. Cyrus Shams asserts that death, “because it is inevitable, means nothing.” But, death carries weight for those that remain. Grief is a testament to the life that did exist. Death’s inevitability does not necessitate the loss of meaning, rather meaning lives on with those that remain.
There is also something else buried in claims that death means nothing. Consider the civilian deaths of Iran Air flight 655: the grief felt for the victims; the meaning attributed to their lives; the violence of the US—none of this should be lessened by death’s inevitability. As state sanctioned mass murder continues in Gaza, we cannot say that death means nothing. To disregard the significance of death is to render oppressive systems acceptable, and, ultimately, this undermines the social world that connects us.
Works Cited:
Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr!. Picador, 2024.
Akbar, Kaveh. “In Martyr! Kaveh Akbar Is Thinking About Eternity.” Interview by Sophia June, Nylon, 2 Feb. 2024, https://www.nylon.com/life/kaveh-akbar-martyr-interview.
JAMES GOBBEY (he/him) is a writer and bookseller from lutruwita/Tasmania. His work has previously been published by Aniko Press and Togatus Magazine.
July 12, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Moon Wrasse
by Willo Drummond
Puncher and Wattmann
ISBN 1922571679
Review by MISBAH WOLF
When I first picked up Willo Drummond’s debut poetry collection, Moon Wrasse, I was torn between a deep panic of knowing I wanted to become mixed up in the muck, blood, and bloom of the work and wanting to also turn away from the words. Words are spells. Words are little invisible ties between what is captured and what is lost, and somehow, as if by magick, portals are opened for us to walk through. In a true sense, this is an offering from Drummond of a portal of initiation—you choose which kind—one you’ve already been in parallel with, one you have no memory of, or one you care enough to walk along with to experience and become more completely human.
I opened the book to the poem ‘Seed’ which, in a sense, introduces what I see as a quartet of work. I read;
At this season’s out-swelling
after the mangrove moon
she sets her grief in a small seed pod.
(7)
I, myself, had been dealing with ‘unexplained infertility of ten years, and I wasn’t ready to read it, but the book called out for a conversation with me. I recognized it within my own immediate framework as a book of invisible connective tissue, a witch’s book of shadows, both literary and psychic, between the dead, the dreaming, grief, the acute attention to the breath of things and the indexing of transformations. This is a book where surfaces appear deeper once immersed, where continual intertextuality adds further dimensions, and no energy is ever lost since all is transmuted. A pause must be taken, and a return, like a Joseph Campbell Hero/Heroine, is undertaken;
She’s looking for
a future to enframe the past
as it exceeds
it. Flickering familiar
like the pulse
of being needed.
(7)
Reading this work, I was able to chart a ship in the shadows of Drummond’s glorious book—through my own grief over childlessness, my estrangement from others/lovers, my deep love for ecology, for the mud and muck of various things I have lost, found, and re-imagined. These things grow in Drummond’s poetry through mud and shadow like mother mangroves, endangered blooms, and conversations with visceral transformations under ‘dappled light’. (60) Such love is to be invoked in the poem “Moon Wrasse” where the narrative etches through the shifting cycling as a lover/other/self that is;
here, moving in
our translucent
cocoon
‘self-made’ and safe
as houses— (60)
It is an homage to great love transforming and witnessing the beloved’s
new lucency—
clear as the blue
of your new man suit
sweet as the day
true as the day (60)
This enamoured lover/narrator bears witness/encourages and celebrates this alchemical corporeality with tender reassurance in this delicate liminal space,
holding hands
like younger lovers
in a film
in a dream.” (60)
The shape of the month as I read this work was also colored by other books at the same time. Fitting for such a book that plays, converses, and returns to dialogue entries, quotes, and habits of other poets and writers. Rest assured, Drummond includes notes about particular moments, words or passages from other writers in this book to show how interwoven and entangled this book is with others’ work. In The Childless Witch, Camelia Elias says: ‘The age we live in is, indeed, no longer an age of lamentation. We lost that art long ago’ (Elias, 2020). The reason I’m including this quote from Elias is that Moon Wrasse has developed a very delicate language of lamentation, with images of ‘striking,’ ‘scraping,’ and ‘digging,’ further propelled after Louise Glück—as in Drummond’s ‘The Act of Making,’ (11) using techniques of alliteration, words beating against each other, switching to words that require the tongue to be pushed gently through lips—there is a feeling when reading this poem and many like this, of incanting. In ‘The Act of Making,’ Willo Drummond employs a rich array of poetic techniques that enhance its incantatory quality. Vivid imagery and sensory language, such as ‘gardens fecund with memory'(11) and ‘imagined blooms heavy with the scent of hope,'(11) create an immersive experience, while enjambment ensures a seamless flow between lines, propelling the reader forward, as in
.How can you bear
so many imagined blooms heavy with the scent of hope
let go? (11)
The use of repetition and parallelism, like ‘day after day,’ adds musicality, and the alliteration and assonance in phrases such as ‘fluffed intentions’ and ‘solitary bees’ create pleasing sound patterns that my mouth wants to vocalise. Caesura introduces rhythmic breaks for emphasis/division/rupture of grief;
Unwomanly. Bent queen
brimful of love shame with nowhere to dig
in (11)
Also, the sharp juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, such as ‘love/shame’ and ‘hope/let go,’ deepens the poem’s emotional impact. Symbolism, unconventional syntax, and strategic line breaks contribute to the poem’s unique rhythm and pace, while personification and metaphor, like ‘remembrance scratches your knuckles’ and ‘bees hover, uncertain,’ imbue the poem with lyrical depth. These elements combine to make Drummond’s poem feel rhythmical and lyrical, making me want to read it out loud. And I do speak them and it is a pleasure to let the words slip and pause between my teeth and tongue.
We can look further into such poems as ‘Note to Self (in Novel Times)’ that inscribes like graffiti on an ancient/new wall to a future/past/now self, on a fridge pinned up by magnets to;
Remember to love
the world. Love
the wailing, rolling world;
the air; the wildness
of wind lifting a million kites
of change (72)
Such a poem circles back through voice, through lamenting, through oracle (as Earth) as change always present to call one back home. In The Childless Witch, Elias also reframes such a being as ‘able to cast a powerful spell of movement, a movement that goes from trembling, to dance, to the use of voice, the oracle and a state of grace’ (Elias, 2020). Looking through Drummond’s book, these states of ecstatic magic—shadowy and bright—are evident in the language and invocations that run rife throughout this collection. There is a language of lamentation here, as previously suggested—of that which will not grow among the commonly seen, and offers instead the witch’s second sight such as in the poem ‘Ways of Seeing.’ This narrator is pensive with ‘portents’- where moon cycles are traced and named;
While others turn with such precision,
radiant orbs—content
filled—I dream of conjunctions
luminous alignments
stackings of hope (20)
This second sight seems always pensively aware of the delicate nature of life in ‘The Art of Making’ that we as readers intrude/bear witness/are gathered round to see ‘Somewhere, a ghost orchid blooms’ (12) This rare orchid/child/being blooms only once a year, pollinated by mimicking male sphinx moths deep in forests where it sucks the moisture from the air.
With this invitation from Elias—’trembling, dance, voice, oracle, and grace’ resound through Drummond’s work. There is even a further complexity established by which Drummond records in her notes at the back of Moon Wrasse that the line from the poem ‘Seed’,
where what cannot be
is (8)
gestures to Jennifer Moxley’s claim that ‘lyrical utterances record voices structurally barred from social and political power.’ (Drummond, 76). This first poem is set adrift from the four sections as a poem in motion, of coming up from elsewhere by will;
here in the lyric tense
she stills to witness
each furred pod/
gain its wild purpose—’ (7)
This feels like an invocation to voice, to the tiny seed to speak its will, to inscribe and to create. Again, a voice unheard/heard is set in motion in ‘Sail,’ where the other’s silent voice is;
voice, a gaping mouth, calls
from a crack in the world: desolate
wind, sweep my knowledge
into oblivion, drop me back
into the well. (21)
Read it aloud, read it softly and it could well be the words of shamed/guilty/lamenting Medea, such a misunderstood and maligned witch, also a favourite childless witch of discussion for Elias. (Elias, 85)
I have enjoyed framing Drummond’s work as part of a Quartet, a story perhaps like a cycle connected in four parts, likened to the four major phases of the moon—the new moon, the first quarter, the full moon, and the last quarter—because so much of the work makes invitations, invocations, and references to the moon. In Drummond’s section ‘The Art of Losing,‘ ‘Of Finding and Not Finding Levertov,’ ‘Forming and Transforming,’ and ‘Arriving,’ why not take this as a template, traversing phases of the moon? Considering that in my reading, I felt poetic tidal shifts under the witch’s tools of moonlight and water, whether inscribed as bodies, mangroves, fish in moonlight, or rare blooms sucking at the mist. I enjoy mysteries and puzzles and esoterica, so I have dug into this deep pleasure in making these connections through the language or merely literary pareidolia. But there are clues to make such connections, such as mention of the ‘spun to song of sun played at waning moon‘ (61) in ‘A Promontory/A Memory,’ and, of course, the poem ‘Moon Wrasse’—the fish that changes sex to mate and has a crescent moon on the caudal fin, the energy of such seems to suggest a letting go of what has been and finding hope in a ‘translucent cocoon'(21) moving towards the new moon. The new moon is, of course, the dark unseen moon. It is the place that calls for presence and to explore the unseen, and I pose that this is the beginning phase we enter from the start of the book, with poems that seem to scry into the unseen. Considering the first poem ‘Seed’ moves from the lines;
In waning luminescence
on the aqua-terrestrial shore
she trains her eye
to velvet vivipary
on very salty water
She’s looking for
a future
to enframe the past
as it exceeds it. (7)
It is the entrance towards the darkness of the new moon in the first quarter ‘The Art of Losing.’ In the new moon phase, there is no visible moon in the sky, and it is the time to explore the unseen, to call for presence, and to stretch the grief unfathomable into song and poetry.
The first poem of this quarter, “The Act of Making,” is indeed what Camelia Elias calls ‘the lost art of lamentation’(Elias, 15), again inscribing vividly with a question;
How can you bear
so many imagined blooms heavy with the scent of hope
let go?” (11)
Set behind this poem is hauntingly Glück’s ‘The Wild Iris’ (“Hear me out: that which you call death I remember”) like the wild Iris, reborn, returning from dissolution to ‘find a voice’—here Drummond masterfully extends the deep mystery of Glück’s poem of death and rebirth, and continues the esoterically charged moment to look for portents, to have knowledge of the rare ghost orchid ready to be born.
In this first quartet too, ‘Up to Our Knees in It’ explores the unseen mother mangrove beneath the surface, extending and connecting, living anywhere despite the ‘cinema seats and soft drink cans‘ (15) thrown into the waters.
Furthermore, Drummond’s poetry, particularly in the sequence ‘The Rilke Index’ and ‘Open Secret,’ showcases a profound engagement with the poetics of Rilke and Levertov. By using index items as titles and integrating verbatim citations, Drummond creates a rich intertextual dialogue. This approach pays homage to Levertov’s method of personal indexing and underscores Rilke’s enduring influence on Levertov’s work, which in turn feeds and nourishes Drummond’s. The titles and substantive material, marked by italics for Rilke and inverted commas for Levertov, reflect a meticulous synthesis of response, citation, and allusion (Drummond, 2021).
Central to Drummond’s poetry is the theme of attention and participation, echoing Rilke’s poetics. In ‘The Rilke Index,’ phrases such as ‘True singing/ is a whispering’ (35) and ‘It hums along the avenue of original grief polished as a stone’ which highlight the importance of quiet, attentive engagement with the world (Drummond, 2021). Similarly, ‘Open Secret’ uses the imagery of a Peltops singing her inwardness to suggest a deep, participatory observation of nature.
Drummond’s work exemplifies Rilke’s Ding or thing poetics through its focus on sensory, concrete experiences. The detailed imagery in ‘The Rilke Index’ and the tangible descriptions in ‘Open Secret’ underscore the importance of observing and interacting with the material world. This attention to the physicality of things aligns with Rilke’s belief that true insight comes from an intense, participatory observation of one’s surroundings.
Reflecting deeply on the nature of creation and the self, Drummond’s poems reveal a continuous journey of self-discovery. ‘The Rilke Index’ and ‘Open Secret’ meditate on the interconnectedness of self and creativity, suggesting a composite identity shaped by various influences. Drummond’s imagery, such as ‘the owl afloat, the white egret’ and ‘the blood, the plough, the furrows made,’ captures the essence of seeing with ‘second sight,’ a deeper, intuitive understanding of the world (Drummond, 2021). This second sight is the sight of the witch, the seer, the being that dares, even when nothing necessarily will come of it—to look and to record presence/absence. Not only is second sight present here, but also the Owl—the totem of Hecate—Queen of Witches, and the action of tilling the land with blood and earth, much like the ingredients for a spell.
Willo Drummond’s poetry collection extends the poetics of Rilke and Levertov, emphasizing immersive conversations with the world—the unravelling power of careful observation and recordings. This work also creates carefully layered, intertextual dialogues. These inscriptions highlight the profound connection between self/other, the environment/body, second sight/inscription—all of which is the (witch’s) work of invocation with moon, of birth, death, rebirth, of longing (and the language of lamenting), and a complete presence of ritual observation, a conversation with invisible/visible forces transmuting. This book is an homage to love and magick and finding ways to reinscribe very necessary and vital voices and existences that have slipped/been silenced/written over/unpublished/forgotten. But it is also more than an homage—it is script that spells out the nature of time, looks closely at the Fibonacci spiral of bodies in presence with each other, of lamentation and joy rupturing through—detailed and woven with the echoes of other writers and poets, insistently in deep relationship to ecology, to the unseen dance of interconnection, such as the spellcasting in ‘All of it’ as ‘an ecology of selves’ (67) which with tremulous blooms/hands/words/voices reimagined worlds, relationships and love.
References:
Drummond, W. (2021). The Rilke Index. TEXT Special Issue 64: Poetry Now, eds. Jessica L. Wilkinson, Cassandra Atherton & Sarah Holland-Batt.
Drummond, W. (2023). Moon Wrasse. Puncher & Wattmann.
Elias, C. (2020). The Childless Witch: Trembling, dance, voice, oracle, grace. EyeCorner Press. ISBN 978-87-92633-57-6.
June 26, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Djinn Hunters
By Nadia Niaz
Hunter Publishers
ISBN: 978-0-6453366-9-6
Reviewed by JAVARIA FAROOQUI
The Djinn Hunters is a literary fusion of colours, words, shapes, and heritage, which has been carefully crafted in very interesting and distinct poetic styles. Nadia Niaz plays with the strands of her memories of Lahore to build evocative narratives in the short space of her poems, which occasionally carry elements of horror and the uncanny. Each of her fifty-one poems in this collection exhibits a wide range of expression and literary finesse that provides a refreshing, consistently engaging reading experience.
The horror in The Djinn Hunters is not meant to surprise the readers into a terrifying shock, rather it aims to disturb the very core of everyday existence. The first poem, “A Map of Mothers,” is primarily about the transmission of traits from female ancestors and the genetic inheritance that spans generations. However, Niaz’s dexterous use of simple words infiltrates the generational story line, unsettling readers with the image of grandmother and great-grandmothers haunting the voice of the persona. Absence of punctuation not only scaffolds the sense of continuity but also a deep feeling of horror:
I carry my mother in my mouth
in teeth and warm
bladed tongue
one grandmother, long absent
haunts my speckled skin
the rhythm of my feet
the other finds herself
in the set of my chin
the stubborn song in my belly
(1)
The poem starts with the imagery of carrying the mother in one’s mouth and concludes with varied maternal legacies interweaving and moving towards a surreal and ambiguous sense of belonging. The absence of pauses around “home” emphasizes the continuous evolution of human inheritance and gestures towards the uncanny behind the word that mostly signals safety and surety. The way in which the poem moves forward accentuates the haunting presence of ancestors within an individual’s identity, reminding us of pasts that perpetually influence the present:
great-grandmothers twine
in my hair, lurk in my bones
score my palms with their directions
each one pulling a different way
each one pointing towards home
(1)
The collection boldly utilizes poetic forms that blend verse and prose in engaging ways. The experimentation with form sometimes includes lines of varying lengths or concrete shapes, or some visually absorbing style like the one used in “A Dream of Daadi’s Paan Daan.” The consumption of paan, a mouth refreshment made from betel leaf popular in South Asia, has strong associations of tradition and culture. The paan holder, or paan daan, has a significant material value because of its association with the elders in South Asian households, and as such it symbolizes a sense of cultural rootedness and refinement. Niaz enhances this cultural reference by incorporating a unique visual element in her poetry. She prints four words, “roll,” “chew,” “spit,” and “fold” in grey ink behind the main text in black, inviting readers to decipher the entire process of paan consumption that involves rolling and folding the leaf, chewing the leaf, and spitting out the excess red substance (3). This creative approach not only adds depth to the poem but also engages readers in an interactive exploration of cultural heritage.
The Djinn Hunters extends its thematic reach well beyond its primary focus on djinns and a distinct sense of horror, to present a rich tapestry of different subjects. As a native of Lahore, I found Niaz’s striking and picturesque descriptions of the city’s sights, sounds, and smells particularly resonant and evocative. She manages to capture the essence of Lahore with meticulously crafted sensory details that allow readers to become part of the vibrant atmosphere displayed on the page:
The corners of this city sag under stories of generations
more numerous than the grains of imported sand lining
its avenues poised to be mixed into concrete buildings
(“Fine Aggregate” 23)
Heritage, continuity, culture, and belonging are the themes that run throughout this collection and scaffold the stylistic experimentations. There are sub themes of romance, politics, and feminism that emerge from the crafted verses in the form of powerful statements and images. For example, in the poem quoted above, a simile of pomegranate is used for young women walking on the streets:
Young women wander under strict instructions to stay close
crowded as pomegranate seeds, skins leathered against leers while
their mothers pick stones from rice and dhal and swallow smoke
(23)
The mothers and the young women are bound by traditional roles and surrounded by misogyny. In this collection of poems, Niaz often juxtaposes the push and pull of cultural and heritage to paint the ways in which women are marginalized in patriarchal societies. “August in Lahore” questions the socio-economic class divisions and the misogynist attitudes prevalent in Pakistani society. While the boys from the lower working class have the freedom to “dive” in the dirty canal, upper-middle-class college girls keep sweating profusely in their modest outfits of “starched muslins and lawns” (20). The socio-economic class of the characters in the poem is determined by the “burned earth brown” bodies of the boys and their usage of the city’s “filthy oasis” to find relief from hot weather, and the connection of cars and cell phones with the girls (20). The four stanzas of the poem are precisely divided into six lines, which consist of a single sentence that duly ends with a full stop, representing the restricted existence of young women. The young woman who is traveling in cars and studying in colleges gets to listen to the humble start of her father who used to swim in the canal like the boys. The classed and gendered differences between the boys and the female protagonist in the poems are emphasized when the girl’s father looks back at the freedom and lack of social capital in his youth but makes “no wish” for the daughter to experience something similar. The “filthy oasis” of the city’s “refuse” in which the boys are swimming implies a disadvantage and a reduction, which finds an echo in the feeling of “drowning” that envelops the upper-middle-class privileged woman. She is wrapped in “days” that are like a “wet sackcloth, a dragging, dripping/weight that air-conditioning cannot lift” (20). The extended metaphor of “filthy ocean” epitomizes the socio-economic and gendered restrictions in a patriarchal and underdeveloped country.
The Djinn Hunters finds its pace in the exploration of the human and extra-human existence. The collection presents temporal reflections on heritage, culinary practices, cultural rituals, and the nuances of different spatiotemporal settings. Niaz experiments with a wide range of literary forms in this book, taking considerable creative chances. Her methods include visual construction of landscapes of words, code-switching to Urdu, and inclusion of Pakistani locales and subtle cultural differences without any explanation for the intended global readership. Her willingness to push limits and provide readers with a diverse and multicultural experience is evident in these daring stylistic choices. Readers can indulge in the The Djinn Hunters experience for leisure reading purposes or choose to let the book take them on a literary journey. In either case, it will provide them with new insights and coerce them to view the world through an inclusive lens with literary sophistication.
Dr JAVARIA FAROOQUI holds a PhD from the University of Tasmania, Australia, and works at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Her recent book, Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.
June 22, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zoe Karpin is a short story writer and has been a teacher for many years. Her short stories are published in Mascara, Sudo, FemZine, Going Down Swinging, Dot Lit, Hecate, and forthcoming in Kalliope X.
How it Happens
Her first permanent appointment and a regular income; she could pay her way with her lover. Her new faculty room; her face turned to sunlight streaming through the north-facing window, needing to be here, needing to be somewhere – why not here? As events had worked out and oh to belong eventually – part of this scenery like the great eucalyptus, its limbs raised over the building and girth so wide -three people could rest against it.
At morning break. She was slim wearing a tight grey pencil skirt plus black pumps but weary. Up late at night preparing work for students, no way around this, the early days.
In the centre of the room dolmades and cheese were set out on the large table; her inaugural group morning tea. Food graciously displayed on hand for consuming. Winding strands of long dark hair out of her face, I must join the eating.
Her fellow instructors gobbled the dolmades. The vine leaves used in these dolmades, ‘freshly prepared following an old Greek recipe off the internet,’ the cook said.
‘Go on Olivia’, take two.’ They were watching. You have not eaten our food before. Smiling, liking dolmades and expecting to want more, a dolmades hovered near her lips. However, so disappointing- not enough lemon, too greasy and the rice so gluggy. Swallowing though, bit after bit. Dissimulation – she had to do work for the next instruction, sunk into her seat at her desk. Olivia, not fussy, not unhealthy, not obsessed about her weight, was just demanding of quality when there was no real obstacle to acquiring it. No war or famine, poverty nor any other cataclysmic event stood in anyone’s among the staff and so many sources of information about good cooking; books, internet, tv etc. No excuses. The rest of the faculty were still gobbling the dolmades- a whole heaped plate of them and still praising them. Suzy unloaded cheese and cucumber sandwiches from a large plastic container onto emptying plates. ‘Wonderful, yummy.’ many said.
But she kept her head on her work; not so nice-processed cheese and vanilla pasty bread.
But everyone, even Jasmine in the desk next to her, who ate tuna salad every lunchtime, praised the sandwiches.
The bell rang. I am released to teach.
After 4:00 pm there, alone- working back, gazing at five dolmades wearing tutus of oil and crumpled sandwiches, the leftovers on the enormous table in the heart of the room, abandoned like her to get stale. The cleaner was not fancying them but muttering, ‘What a wasteful lot you are.’
Her face aflame with shame. She prepared and cooked exact amounts of food for her purposes.
If she forced all the food down together however- the excess greasy oil in the dolmades would counterattack the staleish, insipid bread of the cheese and cucumber sandwiches. And more -even though the cheese was a processed mildest cheddar, synthetic like, and the cucumber was sliced in unforgivable thick slices she might slosh it all down with a hot cup of milky tea.
She was there working; swallowing and chewing away, the cleaner vacuuming around her. But regret hit her hard. Later. As if there had been a military assault on her taste buds. She insulted them, too; her mother and grandmother who passed on to her appreciation of good cooking.
Then Jasmine made cannolis. She was not Italian, but she was so proud of them, a special for the latest monthly faculty morning tea.
‘Look – please take one,’ she said to Olivia. ‘ I’m a good cook, you know.’ Once again to Olivia.
Olivia blushingly,’ of course, I’ll have one. What had Jasmine been sensing?
Not even having to taste the cannolis- to know they were ill conceived, too thick and doughy, white instead of brown, not fried enough. Filling with chocolate not ricotta cheese. A travesty.
The cannoli. Any tooth aching sweetness she could get past by drinking her coffee, biting a mouthful like diving into a pool of cold water on a winter’s day. It’s sticky, tacky, soft, gooey, doughy shell more sickening than expected but she was saying unbelievably. ‘I’ll have another.’ She gave Jasmine a thumbs up. Jasmine hugged her around her waist. She could finish the cannoli under the tree outside.
On another morning, the head of Department Linda carried a large cheesecake she had baked. Everyone was saying and laughing. ‘It’s a welcome for Olivia,’
But cheesecake is tricky, and the base was soggy and the creamcheese drippy and cloyingly sweet.
The cake was a gun to her head. She couldn’t swallow more after the first bite but did. Everyone ate their slice and they all said,’ delicious.’
‘How wonderful a head who cooks for their staff.’
‘Give the four pieces left over to Olivia, our newbie. ‘
The four pieces were wrapped in cling wrap and then put in a brown paper bag and presented to her, –
She would drop three slices into the neighbour’s compost and one slice to their dog. Certainly.
A long hold up on the Hume highway homeward bound making it later even, again. The brown paper bag was on the front passenger seat, almost a companion, slightly cosy. Their hospitable gesture. She yawned and sighed and that slight hunger gnawing stomach, usually dismissible -nutrients in her blood like glucose, amino acids and fatty acids possibly, at a low concentration.
She shoved the three pieces of the cheesecake, one after another, into her mouth, swallowing a double-edged sword of the collegial affinity she was so wanting and the disfavor at the means of its execution.
Each swallow the cakes’ vileness was less and less irksome. It went on like that. More poorly made cakes at morning tea, more swallowing but less and less disgust every time. Enjoyment even. Pleasure in the desensitization; denaturing, cheapening, debasing and corrupting and she was talking to everyone then, Pete, Suzy, Maria, Janey, Gracie, Andy, Rog, Jazzie, even Linda.
June 13, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carielyn Tunion-Lam (she/they) is a writer, videopoet, educator, and cultural worker. She has worked in the arts & cultural sector, the community services sector, and has experience using creative strategies in grassroots community organising.
Carielyn is interested in exploring themes of radical softness and nostalgia, and the tropical Gothic from an anti-colonial, diasporic perspective. She is a participating artist in Curious360 by CuriousWorks, and her work has been published by kindling & sage, Mascara Literary Review, Emerging Writers Festival, SBS Filipino and KAP Magazine. She is currently studying a Master’s in Literature & Creative Writing at WSU. Carielyn’s ancestral roots are in the archipelago of the so-called Philippines, and Kowloon, Hong Kong. She currently lives, studies, works and treads respectfully on unceded Burramattagal on Dharug country.
I am a deep-sea fisherwoman, but I do not catch fish
“…the diasporic woman’s identity is always already fractured and for her[,] autobiographical writing and the process of subject formation lies in celebrating the fracture rather than attempting to cure it.” – Bidisha Banerjee, 2022.
I went handline fishing once and was useless at it. I ended up seasick, huddled and damp in the stern the whole ride back to shore. Years later I would rent a cheaply converted garage in Umina, my answer to a yearning to be near the sea. I would swear up and down Ocean Beach Drive that I’d learn how to fish, hellbent on the idea that if I eat it, I should be able to hunt it or harvest it. But to this day, I’ve never caught a single fish.
Dr Leny Strobel says that Filipinos are consigned to fishing – not just because our skin is home to the salt of our islands – but because we’re fated to gather stories turned adrift. To those of us for whom fragmentation is genesis and legacy, fishing for stories is a way of coming full circle. A way of mapping the fractures and fissures that make up the ever-shifting landscape of our histories, our selves.
So okay, I may be shit at fishing but perhaps I am a fisherwoman after all.
*
Separation
I float a wave back to the Parañaque house. A bougie two-storey townhouse with stucco walls packed tight with dreams. Bordered by coastland in one of Metro Manila’s earliest gated villages, the estate was bankrolled by the Banco Filipino empire before its forced closure under the first Marcos dictatorship. Papa’s modest self-made fortune had just reached its peak when he bought the plot, and it would be another decade or so before finances would start to dip. He grew up struggling, and mama’s family still were, so maybe this house was their way of buying into a vision of security and success. I remember it being huge in the way everything is when you’re a kid. Crossing the Pacific again some twenty years later, I’d come back to an anachronism. How much smaller it would seem.
My parents built the house in the early-1990s, drunk on the siren song of domestic bliss. My father used sand and bare hands. My mother opted for perennial plants. I imagine them playing house in some high-stakes game of pretend: man, not-wife, and the new baby. In a few years, they could enrol the child to an international school nearby. The woman could start a small business selling locally-made Narra-wood furniture to rich households. The man might even leave his wife. They’d be a real family. When you wish upon brick and mortar against the Amihan tides.
Over the years, the waters would rise. Trade winds would blow their relentless cycles but the house would stay the same. An empty, yearning nest. It would miss out on first words and first steps, stay oblivious to fists and fights, the paranoia and bald-faced lies. Its walls would never feel the touch of warm hands and its windows would never open for sunlight darting through its rooms. Termites and mice would lay claim to the bones. A salty damp would set into the floorboards. Its foundations would crack and loosen underfoot, an ocean between us, always.
The neighbours would set their sights on it. They’d pick its locks and enter by stealth. Maybe they sought to lick the gilt off the cornices, scrape the good intentions off the walls. Maybe they took the door off its hinges to see if anything worthy lay on the other side of the frame. Ethically, I don’t oppose the break ins. Why should a house stand empty in a city where sleeping bodies line the streets?
Twenty years would pass and I’d scrap for a plane ticket back. I’d smash the padlock off the gate, jarring in its errant coat of red applied by some interloping budding decorator.
I’d stand in the wreck of it and let the smell of forgetting fill my pores. I’ve scrubbed my body many times since, but I carry it with me still, to this day.
*
I hesitate to identify as Filipino. The word derives from the Spanish coloniser king Philip who, through Magellan’s colonial activities, staked false claim over the archipelago’s diverse peoples, lands, skies and waterways. To frame myself as a little Philipp-ite is reprehensible to me yet I use this label as a way of speaking the language of the dominant tongue, to use its tools of categorisation as a way of carving out space. It is a way of having voice, misconstrued though it may be – a way of insisting, I am here! My people have dived for pearls with friends here, well before your white sails bruised these shores.
The poet Eunice Andrada has been known to identify as an Ilonggo poet, resisting the homogenous ‘Filipino’ label which reeks of Tagalog hegemony in the archipelago. The issue of identification and identity is further complicated for me by lost family and ancestral histories. It was only on my 33rd birthday last year I learned my maternal grandmother was from Pangasinan, land of a thousand islands. I have no stories, no photographs of her as a child to go by, but this is how I like to picture her. A girl growing up by the sea.
*
“Non-fatal drowning describes a drowning incident where the individual survives. In some cases, an individual may not suffer any serious health complications following a non-fatal drowning. However, in other cases, non-fatal drowning can significantly impact an individual’s long-term health outcomes and quality of life.” – Royal Life Saving Australia
The first time I remember drowning:
Ma and I had just moved into a rental in Dee Why, which kids at my new school called ‘the ghetto’ of the Northern Beaches. I remember thinking, if this is ghetto, you’d die to see where my family live. I’d soon realise they called it ‘the ghetto’ because it was the only ‘ethnic enclave’ on the insular Peninsula(r). The only suburb in the area with an Asian grocer and an African beauty supply store, where the Pinoy and Pasifika families lived, where the Chinese restaurants were legit. I’d never lived in the suburbs before. All I’d known was city smog and chaotic traffic, so I fell quick and hard for the nearby beach.
I went walking on the shore in my school dress one day, brogues and socks on my hands, toes questing in the sand. Suddenly, the sky rumbled grey and the tide began to surge. Water climbed my legs fast and snatched me up into the churn. My mouth filled with saltwater. I started to swallow. I remember thinking, goodbye, mama – strangely calm about it all. That’s when I felt a warm hand close firmly over mine, guiding me out of the crush. My head burst above water, kaleidoscopes of seafoam and upside-down pine trees in my eyes. I lay on the wet sand, strewn under a glassy sky. Soaked to the bone and completely alone.
I don’t remember much else, everything is a vague before and after that moment. My memory has always been hazy. Twenty years later, I’d remember that drowning and wonder, was it a memory, a vision, a dream? I still can’t decide. Whatever happened, I know it was my lola who saved me.
*
When I tell my mother this, she gasps.
Da, the same thing happened to me!
A monsoon season sometime in the 60s drowned the Pasig River leaving it bloated and swollen. She went swimming in the floodwater, seeking pearls amidst candy wrappers and bits of corrugated iron, floating wreckages of plastic debris. Maybe the current got stronger, maybe her little arms got tired and she started to sink. But Naynay reached into the river and pulled her out in a strong, calloused grip.
How funny, ha, Da. She saved me but she was so angry with me.
That night I dreamt of mama as a girl, eating clams with her mother. They fished them out of the water, scooping them up in their hands by the riverside, heads bowed like grateful penitents.
*
Transition
People tell me I look Japanese. They say, but you don’t look Filipino, which is funny because the archipelago comprises nearly 200 ethnolinguistic groups with distinct cultures, stories, Peoples, and rituals. Not to mention the myriad cross-cultural ancestries from beyond the oceans before the intrusion of colonisers and conquistadors. People rarely clock me as Hong Kongese, except my Filipino family who laugh themselves stupid over jokes about my eyes looking ‘inchik’. Truth is, I don’t know if I should identify as Chinese either. My father calls himself a Chinese man but identifies more as a Hong Kong man.
Can I just identify as an island gal? An island baby they-by lady?
*
I started the process of forgiving my father around ten years ago. We drove around Kowloon listening to ‘Don’t cry, Joni’ and ‘La Vie en Rose’ on repeat while he dredged up memories of Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong in WWII like pulling dead fish from the sea. He told me of bodies piled high on streets now stacked with concrete pylons and apartment towers, the same streets beneath our feet. During martial law, people hid in their homes as often as they could. But my father, only seven at the time, tired of fear and the hunger in his belly, would sneak out to shine imperial soldiers’ boots in exchange for biscuits which he’d save to eat with his siblings.
My lola would have endured the Japanese occupation of the Philippines but when I ask my mother about this, she tells me she has no idea what I’m talking about.
My island homes sink and swim with the weight of remembering and forgetting.
*
I met Papa as an old man this year. To be fair, with sixty years between us, he’s been old my whole life. Mortality on our minds, he took me to visit his parents’ graves for the very first time. I balked at the interminable staircases at St Raphael’s cemetery where his father, my 爺爺 rests. Irene was there, his girlfriend of 30 years who’s also 30 years his junior (I met her, too, for this first time this year). She held him as he gripped the flaking green rail, one step after the other. I was scared he’d fall or faint, but he refused a single word of complaint, out of reverence or stubbornness, I’m not sure. Oliver and I sentried in front and behind. A black butterfly trailed us. Hobbling back down, we made the shape of some lopsided creature of grief.
His mother, my 嫲嫲, lay in Wo Hop Shek some 40 minutes away, in a Buddhist graveyard on the hills overlooking Fanling. I was inept at bai-san but I lit the incense, bowed my head thrice and burned the bag of paper prayers adorned with Kwun Yum riding the sea, lotus flowers at her feet. I held Papa’s hand as ash and smoke unfurled in the blue silk sky.
The next day, he confessed with tears in his eyes that his sons don’t visit his parents’ graves. We were in the backseat, ‘La Vie en Rose’ playing again. His unspoken fear that they will not visit him either sat between us.
*
When Lam Him died, he left behind five adult children as his legacy. One was my father, Lam Shuk Chiu, who, devasted by his father’s death, tried to give his heartache purpose by honouring his Honourable Father’s death, honourably. He threw himself into funerary arrangements, buying the finest oranges, chickens, and pigs heads for offerings; and bargaining (respectfully) with a nun to guarantee his father’s dying wish for a Catholic burial after a lifetime as a sometimes-practicing Buddhist – a testament to the care he received at the Catholic hospice where he’d stayed.
After an evening meal, the grieving family sat together on mats on the floor to share memories of their devoted patriarch. As they did, the lanterns began to flicker and the dogs out on the terrace barked feverishly into the night. My father felt the room go cool. A light pressure touched his forehead, and he lost consciousness. When he came to, a sense of peace washed over him.
That’s when I knew, he tells me.
There is no such thing as ghosts. Only spirits.
Incorporation
Is there another me in a same-but-different version of Hong Kong? I imagine her also 33, speaking Cantonese since she was a baby. She visits her ancestors’ graves often, knows the right joss sticks to buy, doesn’t get anxious about her choice in flowers for offerings.
Is there a version of me in the so-called Philippines? She probably doesn’t bother with inane questions like this.
*
My mother has a lot of stories she doesn’t know how to tell. She buried them in forgotten soil and lost the words to unearth them again.
She’ll rewrite herself again.
My father’s stories always lied just behind his tongue. Now he’s opening up, telling me ghostsongs and lovestories around his old fishing town.
Me? I am a deep-sea fisherwoman, but I do not catch fish.
Videopoem (still): ‘lullaby for a fisherwoman’, 2023
Cited
Banerjee, B. “Alphabets of Flesh”: Writing the Body and Diasporic Women’s Autobiography in Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines, English Studies, Vol. 103:8, 1210-1227, 2022. DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2022.2105025
Del Rey, L. ‘Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing’, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard, Polydor, Interscope Records, 2023.
Strobel, L. Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans, 2nd ed. The Centre for Babaylan Studies, 2015
Tan, C. ‘Interview #125 – Eunice Andrada’. Liminal Mag, 2020. https://www.liminalmag.com/interviews/eunice-andrada
June 10, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ben Hession is a disabled writer living on Dharawal country, south of Sydney, Australia. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, the Cordite Poetry Review, Verity La, Bluepepper, Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing, Antipodes and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? He has reviewed poetry for Verity La and Mascara Literary Review. Hession is a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
Cemetery Visit
Sun-faded synthetic flowers adorning
the name plates – flourishes of petals, each
touching on personal, paled memories
of good works that had abounded
in life’s now abandoned field.
One day, their visitors will return, I guess,
to these living artifices of fidelity,
in hope – that plastic, resisting hope –
against our impermanence:
we’re seeing today, remaining in bloom.
Dirt Poor Islanders
